www.elsblog.org - Bringing Data and Methods to Our Legal Madness

31 October 2007

ELS Blog readers located in Southern California might be interested in this event:

UCLA School of Law and RAND Institute for Civil Justice are co-hosting a
conference on Transparency in the Civil Justice System on Nov. 2 at UCLA School
of Law (details here). Researchers who are based
primarily at the RAND Institute for Civil Justice and UCLA School of Law are
collaborating on an analysis of the issue of transparency, both its advantages
and disadvantages, in many aspects of the civil justice system. The following
questions guide their research:

Are there specific examples of problems in the civil justice system that
might have been avoided if the system were more transparent? What are the risks
associated with too much transparency?

How can the civil justice system balance the value of privacy with the value
of transparency?

What mechanisms are involved in providing greater transparency? What are the
costs, and who pays them?

Will greater transparency improve the civil justice system? Is it likely to
improve accountability and increase public confidence?

Are there examples of reforms that have led to greater transparency? Have
they affected outcomes in the system? Have they improved efficiency in the
system?

Can plaintiffs and defendants agree on a cohesive vision of increased
transparency in the civil justice system?

The keynote address will be delivered by
Ron George, Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court. The opening remarks
will be delivered by Ken Feinberg, Special Master of the 9/11 Victims
Compensation Fund.

Kim Scheppele (Princeton) wanted to make sure ELS blog readers were aware of the following Fellowship opportunity. Please note that applications are due by 15 November 2007.

Princeton University's Program in
Law and Public Affairs (LAPA) invites outstanding faculty, independent
scholars, lawyers, and judges to apply for appointments as Fellows for the
academic year 2008-2009. We anticipate naming up to six Fellows who
are engaged in substantial research on topics broadly related to law and public
affairs or law and normative inquiry, including one Microsoft/LAPA Fellow
specializing in intellectual property or the legal regulation of the economy.
The remaining fellowships are not limited in their choice of topics within the
broad theme of legal studies. Successful candidates will
devote an academic year in residence at Princeton to engage in research, discussion, and scholarly collaboration. Fellows
may also qualify to teach a graduate or undergraduate course. Applicants
should have a doctorate, JD, or an equivalent professional postgraduate
degree. The application deadline is November 15, 2007. For more information and for instructions about the on-line application
process, visit the LAPA website.

Kim Lane Scheppele, Director, Program on Law and Public Affairs
Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and in the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University, and Faculty Fellow University of
Pennsylvania Law School. Contact information: Woodrow Wilson School
415 Robertson Hall Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08544. Phone:
1-609-258-6949 Fax: 1-609-258-0922. E-mail: kimlane@princeton.edu.

Princeton University is an Equal
Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. LAPA is co-sponsored by the Woodrow
Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, the Center for Human Values, and Princeton University.

30 October 2007

Wall Street Journal reporter Amir Efrati continues to make a name for himself by aggressively covering the legal education beat. Today's WSJ page B1 story (How to Cut Debt, Boost Job Prospects from Law School) lays out some the calculus that prospective law students should consider in making the decision to enroll in law school. It also includes reference to the benefits of transferring to a national law school after a successful 1L year at a lower ranked institution; in my last post, I learned that this is a very sensitive topic.

The story contains a quote from me and a reference to an alternative law school ranking that I am working on with Andy Morriss (Illinois Law). I would like to add two key pieces of context:

Chances of landing a large law firm job. In the story, I am quoted, "If you go to a school ranked 35th or 40th over one that's ranked 70th
or 80th, you are by no means substantially increasing your chances of
landing a high-paying job." This is more than just my opinion. When I made this statement, I was looking a data that took months to compile. Further, the same analysis holds true when you compare, say, the 25th or 30th with the 50th or 60th. My point is simple: a higher rank in US News does not necessarily provide students with an opportunity set that justifies a price premium. That will be the central takeaway of our alternative ranking--from a student perspective, over-reliance on US News can be a big financial mistake.

Alternative rankings. The story notes that our alternative rankings will include large law firm employment. Our project, however, is actually much broader than that. If a student wants to preserve maximum financial flexibility upon graduation in order to pursue a variety of interesting legal jobs (government, public interest, small firm practice) with little or no law school debt, we will show students how to do this calculus using actual law school data.

As I have said before, the future of legal education is driven by labor markets.

Using original survey data of 311 active and senior federal district court judges, we take the first step in
delineating the institutional rules and norms surrounding the selection
and use of law clerks in the federal district courts. Our findings
reveal that federal district court judges assign their law clerks a
number of substantive job duties, findings which raise important new
questions about law clerk influence in the lower federal courts.

Among their interesting findings: District court judges place an applicant's personality high on the list of desiderata when selecting clerks. ATSRTWT.

26 October 2007

A colleague, Jeff Rachlinski, alerted me to this news report of a study that detected a positive correlation between chocolate and more favorable professor ratings and course evaluations. The study's money-shot goes as follows: "A recent study to be published in an
upcoming issue of Teaching of Psychology Journal, found that students
who eat chocolate before filling out a course evaluation may give their
professor a higher rating than they otherwise would." More specifically, "for each of the nine questions on the
evaluation form, students who were offered chocolate rated their
professor more favorably than students who were not offered chocolate." (emphasis added) A few interesting particulars about the research design follow.

"To conduct the experiment, Youmans pretended
to be administering course evaluations on behalf of the student
government. For one section, he passed around a bag of mini Hershey
bars and told students that they were leftover from a previous event.
The other section, where students were given the course evaluation
without any chocolate, served as the control group."

In addition to the finding that professor ratings from students receiving chocolate increased on every question, also notable was that a rating's boost was observed without attributing the chocolate to the professor. Just imagine the results if the professor bought and personally served students pizza.

24 October 2007

Harvard School of Public Health Department of Health Policy and Management

Assistant or Associate Professor of Law and Public Health

The Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard
School of Public Health seeks candidates for the position of assistant or
associate professor of law and public health. This is a tenure-ladder position, with the academic rank to be
determined in accordance with the successful candidate’s experience and
productivity. The successful candidate
will play a central role in the department’s program of teaching and research.

Candidates should possess the following qualifications: a law degree and a doctoral degree in health
policy (or a related social science discipline) preferred, but candidates with
an MD or MPH and evidence of advanced quantitative research skills will be
considered; a broad knowledge of legal issues in health care and public health
policy and of ethics; and experience in conducting empirical research employing
statistical and econometric methods. Additional qualifications include evidence of the ability or the
potential to manage national and international projects, to collaborate with
professionals in other disciplines, and to teach health law at the graduate
level.

Please send a letter of application, including a statement
of current and future research interests, curriculum vitae, sample
publications, and the names of three referees to the following address. Applicants should ask their three referees to
write independently to this address.

23 October 2007

The Ministry of Justice and the Empirical Legal Research
Support Network are holding a half-day conference:

CHANGING THE RESEARCH LANDSCAPE--THE CREATION OF THE MINISTRY OF JUSTICE: IMPLICATIONS FOR
EMPIRICAL RESEARCH IN LAW AND THE JUSTICE SYSTEM

Date: Tuesday 18 December 2007

Time: 2-5 pm (Registration from 1:30pm)

Venue: Royal Statistical Society, 12 Errol St, London EC1Y
8LX

The creation of the new Ministry of Justice fundamentally
changes the context for undertaking empirical research into law and justice
issues. The traditions and practices of the Home Office were very different
from those of the Department for Constitutional Affairs. This conference is a
first opportunity for those within the new Ministry to inform the research
community about how they see research developing, and the contribution external
researchers will make to their research activity.

Details of the programme are still being finalised, but it
is hoped that it will include:

1. Keynote
address by Professor Paul Wiles

2. Introduction
to current and future research priorities by research leaders in the new
Ministry

• Developing
stronger relationships between the policy and research communities;

• Developing
closer links within the research community (to explore more readily how lessons
in one area, e.g. criminal justice, might read across into other areas, e.g.
civil justice or family justice);

• The scope
for better integration of the research activity of academics and private
researchers and research consultancies;

• The role
of external funders in the new research environment;

• The future
of the Socio-Legal Research Users Forum/other standing links between government
and the research community.

4. Feedback/Questions
and Answers/ Next steps - with commentary from invited academic researchers

Who should attend? Empirical researchers – whether in
university, research consultancies, private researchers, and empirical research
funders with interests in the justice system

This is an open invitation, but numbers are limited so those
planning to attend must register their interest as soon as possible. Places
will be allocated on a strictly first come first served basis. Expressions of
interest should be received no later than 31st October 2007. Confirmation that
you have a place (or are being held on a reserve list) will be emailed by mid
November.

*When replying please indicate whether there are other
issues that you would like to see discussed in the breakout discussion groups.
We will try to accommodate these in the final programme.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), nested within the U.S. Dept. of Justice, remains an important source of data and analyses for empirical legal scholars. I just learned that BJS has an array of employment openings, including active searches for a Deputy Director and Statisticians.

Those interested should go to the USAJOBS website (here). Once at the USAJOBS website type in "Bureau of Justice Statistics" in the search engine (in the "What:" window). This search will locate various job postings and related information. Those really interested should also contact Ms. Lisa Price-Grear at either: Lisa.Price-Grear@ojp.usdoj.gov or 202.616.3561.

20 October 2007

Tom Brunell (UT-Dallas) and Alec Stone Sweet (Yale Law) have updated their important data on cases in the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The data now cover ECJ cases from the 1950s through 2006. They've also expanded the data to include actions brought under Article 226 (infringement proceedings - where the Commission brings suit against a member state) and Article 230 (annulments - where an individual or group sues the Commission itself), in addition to their original Article 234 (preliminary references) data. Jason has kindly added a link to the "Databases" bar on the right; look for the "Litigating EU Law Data" link.

19 October 2007

Matthew Sag, Tonja Jacobi, and Maxim Sytch have written, "The Effect of Judicial
Ideology in Intellectual Property Cases" (2007). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=997963.

The paper
investigates the relationship between ideology and judicial decision-making in
the context of intellectual property. Is the traditional ideological
divide between “liberals” and “conservatives” of little or no relevance in specialized fields like IP? Does law relating to patents, copyrights, trade marks and trade secrets have any consistent or predictable ideological component?

Using data drawn from Supreme Court
intellectual property cases decided in between 1954 and 2006, the paper
argues that judicial decision making in relation to IP is
significantly and predictably shaped by judicial ideology. They find that the
more conservative a Justice is, the more likely it is that she or he will vote
for the IP owner in any given case. Beyond the conclusions themselves, readers might be interested in their use of the
“Martin-Quinn” scores as a measure of judicial ideology.

Over at SCOTUSblog, I posted a Q&A session with Andrew Martin, who is a former guest blogger on ELS and current professor of law and chair of the political science department at Washington University. I interviewed Andrew about the potential academic and non-academic uses of his Martin-Quinn scores of judicial ideology. I also asked him a number of questions about his new co-authored piece on ideological drift of Supreme Court Justices, see here, with Lee Epstein, Kevin Quinn, and Jeffrey Segal, which is forthcoming in issue four of the Northwestern University Law Review. As you may know, the ideological drift piece has been cited and discussed in the popular media and it triggered interesting responses from such excellent scholars as Ward Farnsworth, see here, David Strauss, see here, and Stephen Burbank, see here. Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times even weighed in the on the issue here.

18 October 2007

Entering credentials of transfer students are irrelevant to U.S. News ranking calculations. As a result, many have speculated that transfers are fertile ground for U.S. News gaming. This post examines data on 2L transfers, which the ABA recently collected and released in the 2008 Official Guide. In short, there are a lot of transfers, particularly to schools with high U.S. News rankings. Here the breakdown by US News Tier:

Why am I posting on transfer students? That is an important subtext. During a recent conversation, hiring partners at one of the nation's largest and most prestigious firms (biglaw X) complained to me that they were running across a lot of transfer students at elite law school Y (where pre-screening is not permitted) with nondistinguished 1L records from Tier 2 or 3 schools. As a follow-up to our conversation, I crunched the numbers from the 2008 Official Guide.

But the more salient issue is how firm X responded in the absence of hard data. Because the transfer students could not meet the grade cutoff for an interview at their old school, (a) they did not receive a callback, (b) firm X wasted 30 minutes x 2 lawyers for each incident, and (c) a perception took root that elite law school Y was diluting its product through an unprincipled transfer policy designed to "sell" 2L admission at full tuition price in order to constrict and subsidize a smaller crop of 1L students with higher LSAT scores--and through the process, increase its US News ranking. The hiring partners had a clear, unflinching grasp of the underlying dynamics. Did administrators at law school Y really believe that no one would notice?

In our Student Quality as Measured by LSAT Scores study, Andy Morriss and I theorized that a heavy intake of transfer students was likely the preferred gaming strategy of high ranked schools (lower ranked schools, in contrast, relied upon part-time programs). For schools who were in the U.S. News first quartile in 1992, constriction of the 1L full-time class over the next 12 years was associated with larger gains in median LSAT scores. (At the time, we lacked the data on transfers, which we thought would reveal a revenue-neutral strategy that worked in lockstep with 1L constriction.)

But here are the difficult institutional questions:

Reputation. Is a slight increase in median 1L LSAT
scores worth the damage to a law school reputation among employers? Arguably law school Y's biggest mistake was taking all comers rather than building a larger pool of transfer applicants. Apparently, some Tier 1 and 2 law schools actively solicit transfer applicants and thus can be more selective. Over time, this could easily evolve into a second, substantial admissions process.

Payoffs to the school. Although students and faculty may be jubilant over a bump in the rankings from #14 to #12, or #22 to #19, are more opportunities thereby available to graduates, especially if the gaming strategy is being flagged by key employers?

Payoffs to transfer students. And what about the students with nondistinguished records from lower ranked schools who incurred huge debt for a elite credential in order to subsidize a high LSAT 1L--are these transfer students, with a paucity of callbacks and no 1L peer relationships, clearly better off? See 2005 LSSSE Report (showing heightened social isolation for transfer students)

Externalities on legal education. Can we all agree that any underlying increase in U.S. News rank has zero substance? If so, should the ABA crack down on law schools that divert a lot of resources toward recruiting 2L students for no other purpose than boosting entering credentials of 1Ls?

Without further ado, here is the graph for transfers (Tiers 1-2), ordered by 2007 U.S. News rankings and normalized as a percentage of each school's graduating class [click-on to enlarge]. In Tier 1, Georgetown (+14%) and Washington University (+18%) have the largest net inflow of transfer students. In Tier 2, the big net gainers are Florida State (+20%) and Rutgers-Camden (+16%). The graph for Tiers 3-4, in many respects the mirror opposite of Tiers 1-2, is after the jump.

09 October 2007

My good friend Paul Caron has created a single post at TaxProf that collects, in alphabetical order by author, all the advice for Erwin Chemerinsky. In total, forty lawyers, law professors, and administrators contributed to this series. Although Paul and I got the ball rolling for this series, soliciting dozens of submissions, it was Paul who did the editing, posting, and collecting all the wonderful links. Paul, you did a fabulous job.

I am confident that we have collectively supplied some very good ideas. It is up to Erwin to find the golden nuggets. We wish him much success at UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Law.

On behalf of the JELS editors I am delighted to note that the most recent issue (4:3, Nov. 2007) was recently shipped to subscribers and libraries and is also accessible on-line (here). Papers in this issue range from Dan Kahan (Yale) et al.'s assessment of the "white-male" effect in risk perception to Pascoe Pleasence & Nigel Balmer's (Univ. College London) randomized study of debt advice in England and Wales.